Open Positions

If you are interested in a PhD/Postdoc position in the Power Systems Laboratory, please send your application package including the following documents (all as pdfs) to Prof. Gabriela Hug ():
• Cover letter (including a short explanation why you want to do your PhD/Postdoc in the Power Systems Laboratory)
• CV
• BSc and MSc transcripts
• Research statement (write a 2-page description of a potential project that you would be interested in as a PhD/Postdoc project; the description needs to include a problem statement, why this problem is important and how you would approach the problem)

There are multiple open PhD positions. Specifically, there are three open positions as part of the NCCR Automation (external page nccr-automaton.ch) which are co-advised by Prof. Gabriela Hug at PSL:

Optimized Coordination of Portfolio of Co-Located Renewable and Storage Resources (collaboration with Alpiq)
The electric power system is currently in a transition from a supply system composed of a few large flexible power plants to many variable distributed generation resources based on wind and solar energy. Hence, the system is rapidly changing, and the volatility of the new resources bring challenges to grid operation in terms of balancing but also in terms of grid congestion. Storage devices, such as batteries, facilitate the penetration and support the integration of variable renewable generation. Co-locating batteries with renewable energy sources has multiple advantages such as local coordination potential between generation and storage resources, saving on interconnection costs and possibly even more important reducing the permitting times. However, the existing grid interconnection capacity is limited and has been designed for accommodating the peak generation of the renewable resource. Energy supply companies furthermore need to deal with the situation that they have a portfolio of generation resources distributed throughout the grid.
Hence, in this project, we study the situation in which a supplier has multiple PV and/or wind power parks with which he bids into the market. We develop a stochastic optimization approach which provides as an outcome the optimal bids across multiple markets for a portfolio of renewable resources, some co-located with batteries, taking into account potential grid limitations. Furthermore, we close the loop and provide an approach to operate the distributed resources according to the cleared bids. This project is a collaboration with Alpiq.

Rethinking Frequency Control (collaboration with Prof. Florian Dörfler):
In this project, we ask the question: “if we were to reinvent a modern frequency control architecture, what would its properties and structure be?” While we ask this far-reaching question, we cannot completely ignore the current structure and the fact that electricity markets are an important aspect of power system operation and it will be impractical to suggest a complete redesign and new implementation of the frequency control structure over the entire system. Hence, we aspire to find practical ways to link or integrate parts of the proposed concepts to the existing structure without adding yet another patch to the existing hierarchy.

Optimal Partitioning of Energy Communities (collaboration with Prof. Maryam Kamgarpour at EPFL)
Given the urgent needs to render energy systems sustainable, the penetration of renewable generation in electric power systems is rapidly increasing. The resulting challenges include the variability, intermittency, and uncertainty of renewable resources such as PV and wind generation. Furthermore, the system changes from a highly centralized system with a few large power plants to a highly decentralized system with many distributed energy sources connected close to consumers. The new Swiss Energy Law allows for so called ZEVs (``Zusammenschluss Eigenverbrauch'') which gives prosumers the opportunity to form energy communities and share their own production. The goal of this work is to provide ways to optimally cluster or partition prosumers/grid components into such communities and give them the means to optimally coordinate.